Quick Serve Restaurants, or QSR’s, are all the rage right now in casual dining. The trend of serving “faster, but higher quality” food items than what is served fast food establishments can largely be attributed to Chipotle, which is now a huge success story in the food and restaurant industry.

Since Chipotle made it big, others are trying to figure out what the next big QSR concept is. A lot of stuff since has been various re-spins on the burger concept. Asian cuisine, particularly sushi, is not something QSR as a whole has attempted to tackle yet, due to much higher sanitary standards as well as issues of keeping fish fresh.

How Do You Roll, a QSR chain that originated in Texas (and was profiled on the TV show “Shark Tank“) is attempting to recreate Chipotle’s “Roll your own” model and success but with sushi and other Asian items. There are currently two locations in Florida, one in Sunrise and the other in Gainesville.

Rachel and I had the opportunity to visit the Sunrise HDYR location on a torrentially rainy saturday night with a group of sushi fans from Meetup.com when business was slow, so we got a chance to observe the franchise under optimal conditions for photography but not necessarily to see how service would perform under busy conditions.

As I mentioned, HDYR is a “Roll your own”, QSR restaurant where you pick from a list of ingredients and the sushi chefs put together your custom sushi roll, rice bowl or ramen soup.

HDYR is most definitely a “beginners” sushi place because there are only 3 raw fish types you can choose from, Tuna (Maguro), Salmon, Escolar (a bland white fish, sometimes referred to as “White Tuna”), and “Spicy” variants of the same. Additional proteins that can be rolled are cooked Beef, Chicken, Crawfish Tails, Surimi (“Krab Sticks”), Shrimp, Eel and Tofu.

There is also a nice variety of fruits, vegetables and a number of different sauces and toppings/condiments which allows for a good combination of things for the diner to create. Pre-designed roll combinations range from $3 to $7, so you’re looking at about half of what a mid-range sushi restaurant charges for similar items.

Like at a Chipotle, or a sub shop chain, you order at the counter and they give you a number and you sit down. When your number is called you either go up to get your order, or depending how busy the place is, they bring it to you. The place was so completely dead that evening due to the weather that we got first class table service.

Is How Do You Roll a fresh or a dead fish? Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

At first glance, you might dismiss Lotus Cafe offhand as your average suburban American Chinese joint in a strip mall, because that’s entirely what it looks like. For the first couple of years I lived in this area, that’s exactly what I did, and now I regret that mistake. While I wouldn’t say it has the depth that Petite Soochowor Chengdu 1 have with their Shanghainese/Sichuan cuisine, Lotus Cafe is putting out some seriously good select Taiwanese-style dishes on its menu, particularly all the noodle stuff they do.

I think that by now people realize that I love really spicy food. One of my favorite spicy cuisines is true Sichuan-syle Chinese food, which is characterized by its use of red fire oil (vegetable oil that is infused with red chile pepper essence) and the face-numbing Sichuan Peppercorn, also known as hua jiao (meaning flower pepper, as it resembles a tiny flower) or fagara.

While there are many restaurants in the greater New York metropolitan area with “Szechuan” in the name, the sad reality is that there are very, very few restaurants serving actual regional Sichuan cuisine, New York City included. There are a few such restaurants remaining in Manhattan, most notably being the midtown and uptown branches of Wu Liang Ye. Spicy and Tastyin Flushing, Queensis another good example. The much-loved Grand Sichuan International Midtown closed in April of ’07 but some of its sister (and inferior) branches remain.

So when it came to my attention (by way of an excellent post by Melissa Rayworth on the Montclair food blog Barista) that we in fact had the genuine article right here in Northern New Jersey, I knew we had to go.

Chengdu 1 is right down the road from Montclair State University on Pompton Ave, in the Pilgrim Shopping Plaza next to Clearview Cinema

Can you take the heat? Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

Welcome to the recession folks. That means all of us should be mindful of how we spend our money, and that means for some of us a lot less dining out.

But eating at home doesn’t have to be boring. You don’t even have to sacrifice on quality, “Luxury” ingredients that would otherwise cost you an arm and a leg at a restaurant to eat. You just need to think about buying in bulk and doing a lot of meal planning.

One of my favorite things to eat is jumbo sea scallops. At a decent restaurant, particularly if they are using high-quality dry pack scallops, you can expect to pay between $18.00 and up for an entree with five or six of these guys in them. At a quality fishmonger fresh dry pack sea scallops command a hefty price.

But COSTCO has them frozen, and if you buy a large bag of them the price becomes much more economical per portion. You can eat them over a couple of weeks or even longer, if you have the ability to re-seal the bag with a home vacuum sealer. I also like COSTCO’s shrimp, they are of exceptionally high quality for frozen product, and when COSTCO has their “Seafood Roadshow” events every month, they are even cheaper than the regular discounted COSTCO price.

I admit, I love it when people send me product samples. I’m a junkie for trying new foods and products. So when the folks over at Real Wasabi asked me if I’d like to take 1/4lb of wasabi rhizomes for a spin, I said… SURE!

Most people have probably never eaten real wasabi. Most of the wasabi that you get in sushi restaurants or that is used as a flavoring for snacks and other products is really just white horseradish that is colored green. From a botanical perspective, Wasabi (Wasabia japonica) has little or no relation to white horseradish, and in terms of actual flavor, its really a lot different.

An apt comparison would be how most people perceive the cinnamon used on their French toast or as a common spice as real cinnamon, but in most cases it isn’t — real cinnamon comes from the rare bark of a tree that grows in Ceylon, as opposed to the bark of the Vietnamese cassia tree, the most common substitute.

Similarily, real Wasabi is grated wasabi rhizome, not white horseradish which most common wasabi powder comes from. Although both plants are from the crucifer family, they really taste very different. Wasabi has almost an “electric” taste with a very distinctive tingling sensation produced, which horseradish does not. What it does have in common with horseradish is its incredible pungency, although it is much more fleeting in effect.

One of the reasons why white horseradish is substituted for wasabi is that up until very recently, it only grew in Japan, and importing it was unbelievably expensive. In the last 10 years, two companies have started cultivating it in the US. One company is Pacific Farms FreshWasabi.com, which is based out of Oregon, distributes its product primarily in paste form and until recently did sell fresh wasabi rhizome.

RealWasabi.com is one of the few and I think the only company in the US that actually sells rhizome and grows domestically and ships to anyone who wants them. The company has its own farm based in the mountain region of western North Carolina, where the altitude and the temperate climate has proven to be good for growing Wasabia japonica.

Even domestically grown wasabi is a rare treat, and should be used sparingly. Wasabi Rhizome from RealWasabi.com costs $100 per pound and $55.00 per half pound. The fresh rhizomes have a shelf life of approximately 30 days in the refrigerator, if wrapped in a damp paper towel and kept in a plastic Zip-Lock bag.

Ah yes, the Turkey Burger. For those of us approaching our middle age, it can be a painful reminder that the “party is over”. Whether it’s watching your fats, your cholesterol, or whatever the hell your doctor says is now wrong with you, the Turkey Burger has become something akin to the meat equivalent of Methadone for aging hamburger fiends now having to moderate their intake of whatever they can’t eat anymore. And of course, most of the storebought turkey burgers out there sorely lack the flavor of their beefy counterparts, so its an insult to injury having to eat them in the first place.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Turkey Burgers CAN taste good, but we have to dispell the notion that they are taking the place of beef or should try to taste like beef burgers in the first place. No, to make a Turkey Burger taste good, it requires some outside the box thinking.

You too can make a tasty Turkey Burger. Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.